Fortean-themed music, from opera to metal

Prompted by some comments on a previous post, I thought I'd write something about "UFO-themed songs". But after looking into it, I decided there isn't really anything I can add to the many times it's been done before (even Wikipedia has a list of songs about close encounters with aliens). Instead, I've decided to focus on a selection of more substantial musical works (e.g. operas and concept albums, such as those pictured above) that fit my broad definition of "fortean". These include several less well-known items, including some I discovered while researching my two books about music - SofSFM (2020) and SofM (2023). Here's what I came up with, grouped under the 6 headings of Aliens, Ghosts, Atlantis, Esoteric Traditions, Science Fiction and Comics.

ALIENS

Christus Apollo (1969) by Jerry Goldsmith. An obscure work by a far-from-obscure composer, this was one of several interesting discoveries I made while writing SofSFM. It's a religious cantata with words by SF writer Ray Bradbury, portraying Christ as a spacefaring super-being known by different names on different planets.

Alien Encounter (1996) by Phil Thornton - a purely instrumental album with tracks including "Arrival of the Mothership" and "Visions from the Homeworld". It comes from one of my all-time favourite CD labels, New World Music, which was particularly popular in the 1990s. I've got quite a collection of these  - other artists on the label include Medwyn Goodall and Terry Oldfield (brother of Mike Oldfield).

GHOSTS

There's never been any shortage of operas with supernatural themes - several of them featured in my Fortean Opera post. Here are two more:
 
The Lighthouse (1980) by Peter Maxwell Davies - another discovery I made while writing SofSFM. It's based on the same real-world "Flannan Isle incident" as the 1977 Doctor Who serial "Horror of Fang Rock". In the latter, the mysterious disappearance of the lighthouse-keepers is down to an alien; in the opera, it's caused by a series of ghostly apparitions.

The Turn of the Screw (1954) by Benjamin Britten. This is based on the classic "psychological" ghost story of the same name by Henry James - but whereas the ghosts turn out to be imaginary in the original version, in the opera they're very real.

ATLANTIS

Eagle-eyed readers will notice that one of the CDs pictured above also featured in my recent post about Lemuria - and that's the 2004 album of that name by the symphonic metal band Therion. But there are two other albums worth mentioning in this category that I only have in intangible form in my Spotify library:

Atlantis (1969) by Sun Ra. A fascinating individual who claimed to come from the planet Saturn, Sun Ra featured prominently in SofSFM. But not all his albums are about outer space - this one has tracks called Mu, Lemuria, Yucatan and Bimini, as well as the really excellent 22-minute title track.

Atlantis Ascendant (2001) by Bal-Sagoth - another symphonic metal band, and definitely my favourite (their music always makes me think of a Masters of the Universe cartoon, for some reason). Their concept albums also have really great plots; according to Wikipedia, this one "centres on the exploits of a fictional 19th-century archaeologist and adventurer who has dedicated his life to the field of antediluvian anthropology".

ESOTERIC TRADITIONS

Voyage of the Acolyte (1975) by Steve Hackett - the esoteric tradition in this case being the Tarot. All the tracks are inspired by specific Tarot cards, such as "Hands of the Priestess", "The Hermit" and "Shadow of the Hierophant". There's also a Tarot connection in The Lighthouse, as PMD explains in the liner notes: "The structure is based on the Tower of the Tarot, whose number symbolism is present in all the music".

Tales from Topographic Oceans (1973) by Yes, based on Hindu mysticism. In its original form as a vinyl double album, each of the four sides comprised a single "movement" relating to the four categories of Hindu scripture: the shruti (revealing), the smriti (remembering), the puranas (ancients) and the tantras (rituals).

Zos Kia Cultus (2002) by Behemoth. A previously unsuspected music genre I discovered while writing SofM was what you might call "highbrow" metal, and of the bands I listened to, Behemoth was the one I liked best. This particular album is based on the occult writings of Austin Osman Spare, who I first heard of when he featured on the cover of Fortean Times in March 2001.

Masonic Music (1783-91) by Mozart. I mentioned last week that The Magic Flute was featured in my Fortean Opera post, one reason being its inclusion of a Masonic-style secret society. Mozart himself was a Freemason, and this CD contains several works incorporating Masonic ideas. One in particular, the "Little German Cantata" of 1791, must have seemed as blasphemous to some listeners as Goldsmith's Christus Apollo, with its reference to "the creator of the universe, whether named Jehovah, or God, or Fu, or Brahma" (Fu being a Chinese deity and Brahma a Hindu one).

Also featured in my Fortean Opera list was Wagner's Parsifal, which could equally fit here with its strange fusion of the Grail legend with the mystical writings of Schopenhauer. It features quite strongly in Philip K. Dick's novel VALIS (1981), which brings me neatly to the next item...

(Fortean) SCIENCE FICTION

VALIS (1987) by Tod Machover - a short opera based on Dick's novel. Most of PKD's writings are fortean to some extent, but none more so than the mishmash of metaphysics, religion, alien super-intelligence and conspiracy theories that is VALIS. As for the opera, it's discussed in some detail in SofSFM, so all I'll say here is that anything that combines Wagner and rock music has got to be worth a listen.

The Chronicle of the Black Sword (1985) by Hawkwind. There's always been a close connection between Hawkwind and the writings of Michael Moorcock, but this album (their best, in my opinion) has particularly strong fortean credentials, being based on the adventures of Moorcock's sword-and-sorcery hero, Elric of Melniboné.

(Fortean) COMICS

The Power Cosmic (1999) by Bal-Sagoth. No excuses for mentioning this band a second time, as even the album title reflects one of Marvel's more fortean superheroes, the Silver Surfer. He's also referenced, under his real name of Norrin Radd of Zenn La, in the song "The Scourge of the Fourth Celestial Host", together with several other Marvel characters, including Arishem of the Celestials - the archetypal "ancient alien".

Miss Anthropocene (2020) by Grimes. There were two reasons I sought this album out while writing SofM: (a) I was under instructions to include popular young artists, and (b) she'd spoken out in praise of AI in music, which was one of the topics in the last chapter of the book. I have to say I enjoyed her style much more than I expected, and was pleasantly surprised to find two songs inspired by the distinctly fortean comics that Jack Kirby did for DC in the 1970s: "Darkseid" and "New Gods".

While I could have found plenty more items to go in the preceding categories, that's not true here, as beyond those two albums I'm not aware of any other fortean comic-inspired music (unless you want to include "Grimly Fiendish" by The Damned). But there's a picture of Doctor Strange on the cover of the Pink Floyd album A Saucerful of Secrets (1968), and he's as fortean as superheroes get (see my post Master of the Mystic Arts). The picture, drawn by Marie Severin, is taken from Strange Tales #158, and it's quite hard to see unless you peer very closely. Here's a photograph I took of my CD version, where I've  contrast-enhanced the relevant part (and outlined it in red), to make it a little clearer:
 

Colin Wilson, Philosopher of the Paranormal

Back in the 1970s, Colin Wilson was one of the big names of what might be called "mass-market forteana". But while I did borrow a copy of his 600-page blockbuster The Occult circa 1978, it was only much later that I started to discover just how interesting his ideas are. It began in 2001, when I bought a book by Fortean Times contributor Gary Lachman called Turn Off Your Mind: The Mystic Sixties and the Dark Side of the Age of Aquarius (which I'm sure everyone spotted in my recent shelfie post, towards the right-hand end of the middle shelf). Colin Wilson made an appearance in Lachman's book in the context of the H. P. Lovecraft revival of the 1960s - including the wonderfully surreal cover of Wilson's 1967 novel The Mind Parasites. As evidenced by the photo above, I bought a second-hand copy as soon as I could find one, as well as two later novels in the same vein, The Philosopher's Stone (1969) and The Space Vampires (1976).

The other paperback shown above is a non-fiction one, The Psychic Detectives (1984), which I bought in 2016 when I was researching my own book, Pseudoscience and Science Fiction. Here's what I said about Wilson there:

As his career progressed, he became increasingly fascinated with the world of strange powers. A recurrent theme throughout his fiction and non-fiction is that most people live a robotic existence far below their real potential.

That use of the word "robotic" brings me on to the main subject of this post, which is the Kindle book shown in the above photo - Gary Lachman's Beyond the Robot: The Life and Work of Colin Wilson (2016). I only became aware of it last month, when Gary posted the following on Facebook:

I've just heard that the paperback of Beyond the Robot, my book about Colin Wilson, is now out of print. If you are among the many who didn't buy a copy, there's still time to not get the Kindle edition too.

Since I'm a chronic sufferer from the "Why do friends never read my books?" syndrome, I clearly had to buy it immediately! I'm glad I did, as I found it a fascinating and information-packed read which got 5 out of 5 stars from me on Goodreads. However, this post isn't really a review of the book, so much as a summary of a few things I found particularly interesting from a fortean point of view.

To start with, Fortean Times (as well as some of the "Unconventions" they organized) makes several appearances in the book. At one point Lachman specifically mentions "writing pretty regularly for the Fortean Times", and after Colin Wilson's death in 2013 Gary's obituary of him appeared in FT 310 (the same issue as my review of a comic-strip book about particle physics, FWIW). Although I've never actually met Gary, I did spot him at a couple of Uncons - and, I think, in the audience at the "Aliens and the Imagination" event I mentioned on this blog in 2011. Way back in 1978, in the guise of his musical alter-ego Gary Valentine, Lachman also wrote Blondie's paranormal-themed hit "I’m Always Touched by Your Presence, Dear".

As for Colin Wilson himself, he only came on to fortean-type subjects a decade or so after he started writing. His original focus was on existential philosophy, and his first book on that subject, The Outsider, was published in 1956 when he was just 24. It received a lot of rave reviews, including one in The Observer - which Lachman describes as one of Britain's "highbrow Sunday papers" (which pleased me a lot, since they published a two-page feature by me just a couple of months ago).

In hindsight, it's not surprising that Wilson's own personal take on philosophy eventually led to an interest in the paranormal, since it's ultimately all about widening human consciousness beyond the normal trivialities of everyday life. That's why he was drawn to the Lovecraftian style of fiction - he had no time for the more mainstream kind of novelist "who, in the service of realism, simply portrays life as it is". Another fortean favourite who made an impression on Wilson was Aleister Crowley. According to Lachman, Crowley was the model for one of the characters in Wilson's early novel Man Without a Shadow (1963) - Carradoc Cunningham, an occultist and master of "sex magic". Apparently Wilson himself harboured interests along the latter lines, believing that sexual orgasm can unlock higher states of consciousness and "open the doors of perception".

When Wilson came to write about the paranormal - The Occult (1971) being his first and best-known, but far from only, book on the subject - he did so in a way that was almost diametrically opposed to the standard approach for the genre. As Lachman puts it:

If scientists and other skeptics were ever going to broaden their minds about the occult, then it had to be presented to them logically, in a way that made sense, not in a sensational "believe it or not" manner.

As with his first book about philosophy, Wilson's first book on the paranormal also got rave reviews. In part, this was because "highbrow" readers were far more open to such topics at that time than they are today. Referring to a favourable review that New Scientist gave of Wilson's follow-up book Mysteries (1978), Lachman says:

Such acclaim from a scientific publication for a book about the paranormal is unusual today, and shows that in the 1970s, the paranormal was treated with respect by many scientists, unlike in our more narrowly skeptical times.

Another thing I remember myself from those times, is that interest in fringe topics was much more wide-ranging and eclectic than it is today. The "paranormal", for example, meant a lot more than just ghosts and poltergeists. Listing some of the topics that Wilson covered in Mysteries, Lachman includes "plant telepathy, psychic surgery, transcendental meditation, biofeedback, Kirlian photography, multiple personality and synchronicity". All great stuff - makes me feel more nostalgic than ever for the 20th century!

Colin Wilson was an incredibly prolific author, and I kept noting down titles of books of his that I ought to seek out. The most intriguing-sounding of all is Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals (2006) - something I should have known about already, as Wilson mentioned it in an article he himself wrote for Fortean Times, called "A 100,000-year-old Civilization?" It appeared in FT 272 in March 2011, and I have to admit I'd forgotten all about it (although I looked back at it just now, which is how I know it mentions the Atlantis book). In any case, I've already acquired my copy of Atlantis and the Kingdom of the Neanderthals from eBay, as you can see here:

The Museum of Witchcraft and Magic

This has to be one of the most fortean items I’ve ever seen in a museum – a spoon that was supposedly bent “with mind power” by Uri Geller! I spotted it last week amongst countless other fascinating objects in the Museum of Witchcraft and Magic in Boscastle, Cornwall. This was my second visit there – I went five years ago (see this blog post), but that was on a very busy day and the milling crowds made it difficult to see everything properly. It was much quieter last week and I managed to see a lot that I missed the first time – including Uri Geller’s spoon.

Other items on display include mediaeval books on witchcraft (including Saducismus Triumphatus, which I’ve written about before), protective charms used by soldiers in the 1st and 2nd world wars, Ouija boards, a large collection of magical artifacts that belonged to Gerald Gardner (the founder of modern Wicca), and several dead cats that had been walled up inside houses to keep the rats away. To top it all, there’s a “sex magic” display featuring a large number of little dicks (at least twice as many as I managed to get in this photo):

Actually the main reason I wanted to go to that part of Cornwall was to visit a much newer and less well known museum just a few miles from Boscastle – the Cornwall at War Museum. It’s off-topic for this blog, but highly recommended for anyone interested in 20th century military history. It’s a big place, occupying more than a dozen recently renovated buildings at what used to be RAF Davidstow. There are two full-size aircraft (a Hawker Hunter and a Fairey Gannet), several torpedoes, missiles and target drones, and loads of smaller items.

In one building I spotted an R1155 radio similar to the one I own (cf. the post about my various Museum Pieces). More surprisingly, in a different display in the same building I saw another very familiar object. This is something I’ve had since I was 12 years old, when I inherited all my father’s junk after he died. It’s nothing special – just a camera controller from a photo-reconnaissance aircraft – but I’ve always wondered exactly what period and what type of aircraft it came from. Unfortunately the one in the museum is unlabelled, although it appears to be identical to mine (as you can see from the two photos below). However, an online search yielded this page which includes a picture of one inside a 1950s-era Canberra PR.3/7.

Madame Xanadu

Madame Xanadu #1 (pictured above left) dates from 1981, but I bought my copy much more recently than that. I can’t remember exactly when or where, but it was probably about 10 or 12 years ago. I don’t often buy DC comics, so it was obviously an impulse buy – probably on account of the Tarot cards on the cover, which is a subject I’ve always found fascinating. Quite apart from the Tarot connection, though, it’s a really good story. I was reminded of it last week when I saw a Madame Xanadu trade paperback (pictured above right) in a local shop. It was reduced to £4.99 so I bought that too. The story isn’t quite as perfect as the first one, but it’s still great fun.

The character of Madame Xanadu first appeared in a comic called Doorway to Nightmare in 1978, but the story in Madame Xanadu #1 is pretty self-contained. The setting is Greenwich Village, the same as the early Dr Strange stories (see Master of the Mystic Arts). But there’s little indication at this stage that Madame Xanadu has the same kind of supernatural powers as Dr Strange – the character is basically just a Tarot card reader (albeit one with genuine psychic powers and a rather mysterious background). The story includes a detailed Tarot reading as an integral part of the plot, and there’s a text article on the inside front cover about the history and use of the Tarot.

The story itself isn’t really about Madame Xanadu though, but one of her clients. It’s a variation on my favourite occult cliché – bored teenager starts to dabble in witchcraft for a giggle... gets drawn into a big grown-up world of sex and drugs... ends up summoning timeless demons who don’t give a toss whether she lives or dies. Then enter Madame Xanadu, and cue the happy ending!

The trade paperback, Madame Xanadu: Broken House of Cards, is one of a series collecting issues from a later incarnation of the Madame Xanadu title – the ones in this volume date from 2010. By this time, Madame Xanadu has been retconned as a powerful supernatural being from Arthurian mythology. Personally I feel this is a backward step, because it makes the character harder to believe in and relate to (for me, anyway), and it reduces the title’s Unique Selling Point – the use of Tarot cards – to little more than a cover story to hide the protagonist’s secret identity, instead of her primary talent. But that’s just my opinion – other people may disagree.

Having said that, it’s really a very enjoyable story. It’s set in the late 1950s, which gives it a nice retro feel (even in the 1981 comic, it was implied that Madame Xanadu had occupied the same Greenwich Village premises for several decades without appearing to get any older). There are a number of threads to the story, including one about a cult of devil-worshippers called the Church of the Midnight Dawn. As in the earlier story, the people involved are portrayed as predominantly middle-class and driven by boredom (as you can see in the sample panels below). I imagine that’s true of real-world Satanists, too... although in the real world they probably end up having a promiscuous orgy instead of conjuring up demons from hell. But you can’t have an orgy in a comic book, so you get the demons instead – which is much better!

 

Lost Souls of Dorset

I belatedly finished Dark Fall: Lost Souls – another great game from Jonathan Boakes, creator of The Lost Crown. I originally bought it on DVD four years ago, a few months after it first came out. But after playing it for several days, and getting about half-way through, the game suddenly refused to load. Several attempts at uninstalling and reinstalling failed to cure the problem, so I guess I must have damaged the disc or corrupted the licence file or something (there’s also an alternative paranormal explanation, which I’ll get to later).

A couple of weeks ago I saw Dark Fall: Lost Souls on special offer on Steam for just £2.49 (a temporary reduction from the normal price of £9.99). Needless to say I snapped it up – and I’m glad I did. It’s only in the second half of the game, which I’d been prevented from playing, that the high strangeness really sets in (I still had all my savegames, so I could pick up where I left off). I’m not saying the first half is weak, but it’s essentially just scene-setting. Apart from the wonderfully atmospheric graphics and soundtrack, it’s pretty much a run-of-the-mill point-and-click adventure. But once you’ve found your way up to the hotel’s guest rooms (which is the point I’d got to four years ago) the game really comes into its own – Boakesian weirdness at its best.

As with The Lost Crown, part of the attraction of Dark Fall: Lost Souls is its decaying small-town setting, replete with nostalgic reminders of the simpler world of the mid-twentieth century. What makes it even more interesting for me is that it’s set in Dorset, right on my doorstep. The name of the town, Dowerton (which also featured in the original Dark Fall game, which I haven’t played) is fictitious, and doesn’t have an obvious correspondence with any real Dorset location. The town doesn’t seem to have a beach, yet it’s large enough to have an 18-room hotel. The 1947 rail route (see top-right screenshot above) indicates that it was on a branch line of the Great Western Railway from Dorchester, but I don’t believe there ever was such a thing. There was a GWR branch line from Maiden Newton to Bridport, however – and using that as an analog would put Dowerton ten to fifteen miles south of where I live. That’s what I’d like to think, anyhow!

Dowerton is a town that has seen better days. The train station is abandoned, as is the adjacent hotel. The youths of the town have turned to Satanism, and the hotel is reputed to be haunted. Associated with the occult since the 1950s, the place took a nosedive in 2005 with the disappearance of 11-year-old Amy Haven – a disruptive child who had become obsessed with the paranormal.

The action of the game takes place five years after Amy’s disappearance. It’s played from the first person perspective of a retired police officer known only as The Inspector. “Retired” is a euphemism, actually – the Inspector was fired for fabricating evidence against the chief suspect in the Amy Haven case. This was a sleazy middle-aged man named Mr Bones, who had befriended the child and initiated her into the ways of the occult. Bones denied having harmed her, claiming Amy had voluntarily chosen to pass over to the other side.

The Inspector is still driven to discover the truth about the case. Amy’s ghost has been seen lurking around the old station, so one night he decides to go there and investigate. As he does so, he receives a series of anonymous text messages on his phone, from someone or something that clearly knows a lot about the case.

As I’ve already said, the action starts fairly normally – although exploring a disused train station that has been used for Satanic rituals is always going to have its spooky moments, especially in the dead of night. It’s when the Inspector gets inside the hotel, though, that things really start to get weird. He encounters the restless ghosts of various former occupants who died by committing suicide, and he experiences timeslips that take him back to critical turning points in their lives. He is able to change history, thus freeing the ghosts from their torments. But do things like that happen in the real world? Some aspects of the action have a distinctly dreamlike (or nightmare-like) quality, and on a couple of occasions the Inspector briefly finds himself lying on a hospital operating table while medics fight to resuscitate him.

The Lost Crown was open to a whole range of interpretations, and Dark Fall: Lost Souls is no different. One extreme view would be that the resuscitation scenes are the only objective reality in the game, while the rest is a kind of near-death experience (and I do mean near death – the suggestion at the end, to my relief, was that the Inspector would pull through). In this interpretation, the Inspector is driven by his curiosity and feelings of guilt to re-examine the facts of the case in the form of a lucid dream – hence most of the game is nothing more than a hallucination.

In another extreme interpretation, the operating table scenes would be the only hallucinations, while everything else is objectively real. In this view, the Inspector would end up the villain of the piece – a callous murderer – while Amy and Mr Bones would be innocent victims. But that doesn’t accord with the personality of the Inspector as it comes across in the game – the compassionate way he deals with the ghosts, and his genuine desire to learn the truth. Amy, on the other hand, is not a nice child – although a lot of this may be down to Mr Bones corrupting her impressionable young mind. Anyhow, the ghosts all blame Amy’s presence in the hotel for prolonging their suffering.

My own view lies somewhere between these extremes. I think it’s true that the only physically objective reality is the Inspector lying on an operating table in hospital. But rather than a hallucination, I believe he undergoes an out-of-body experience. His astral body really does travel to the hotel, where he really does encounter the spirits that live there, and he really does free the “lost souls” from the torment Amy is holding them in.. At the same time, other aspects of his experience – the SMS messages in particular – are superimposed on events by his own self-doubts.

But that’s just my own view, because – to put it bluntly – I really liked the Inspector and I really disliked Amy and Mr Bones. I’m sure other people will have their own interpretations!

When I resumed playing the game after the lapse of four years, I started a little way back from the last savegame so I could ease myself back into it. And I noticed a really spooky coincidence that may (if you like paranormal explanations) be the real reason the game broke at the exact moment it did.

When the Inspector arrives at hotel reception, he finds his name written in the guest-book together with the date at which the action is supposed to take place – November 5th, 2010 (see the first screenshot below). As British readers won’t need telling, this is Guy Fawkes Night, and in the outdoor scenes you see fireworks exploding in the night sky over Dowerton station. The Inspector’s arrival time is given as 8 pm, and I played for perhaps an hour and a half after that point before the game suddenly refused to load.

And what is the time-stamp on my last savegame? As you can see from the second screenshot below (zoom in on the bottom left-hand corner), it was “5.11.2010, 21:26”. This uses the 24-hour clock, so 21:26 means just before half past nine in the evening. And it uses the British day-month-year convention, so 5.11.2010 was... November 5th, 2010!

Master of the Mystic Arts

“Speaking of Marvel, what about Doctor Strange? There’s some interesting occult retro-Forteana for you. Very much a part of the occult and consciousness explosions of the 1960s.” That’s what regular reader Ross wrote in one of the comments to last week’s post. There’s only one thing wrong with Ross’s suggestion: I can’t understand how this blog has managed to exist for three and a half years without it ever crossing my mind to do a post about everyone’s favourite Master of the Mystic Arts.... So thanks for prodding me, Ross!

I did mention Dr Strange a couple of times in my Marvel Age of Comics post last year, in the context of my earliest encounters with Marvel superheroes. As I said then, there was a Dr Strange reprint in the first British black-and-white “Power” comic I bought, Fantastic #54, and another in Marvel Collector’s Item Classics #9 – my first ever Marvel colour comic.

The latter reprint came from Strange Tales #119, when the series was still being drawn by Steve Ditko and scripted by Stan Lee. These have to be among the most innovative and ground-breaking comic stories ever written. Eventually I managed to get hold of all but one of the issues of Marvel Collector’s Item Classics (later renamed Marvel’s Greatest Comics) that reprinted Lee and Ditko’s Dr Strange stories. “Beyond The Purple Veil”, “Witchcraft In The Wax Museum”, “The Demon’s Disciple”... you can’t beat titles like that!

Dr Strange first appeared as a short back-up feature in Strange Tales #110, cover-dated July 1963. Like Spider-Man, the character was co-created by Lee and Ditko (although in a letter at the time Stan apparently said “‘Twas Steve’s idea”). Ditko drew the series for three years until he left Marvel in mid-1965, by which time Dr Strange had become a well-established cult figure among the more spaced-out and mind-expanded members of the comic-reading public.

The combination of mystical plotlines with dream-like art, often bordering on surrealism, were foreshadowed in some of the more esoteric tales Ditko wrote for Charlton Comics in the 1950s – which as I’ve mentioned a couple of times before (Giant from the Unknown and The Flying Dutchman in Comics) are now in the public domain and viewable online. Last year I bought a really nice volume called Creepy Presents Steve Ditko, featuring the black-and-white stories he wrote for Warren magazines after leaving Marvel. Again, some of these are distinctly reminiscent of Dr Strange in both theme and style.

It wasn’t just Ditko’s psychedelic artwork that made Dr Strange a sixties phenomenon. There was also Stan Lee’s inimitable way with words. By the hoary hosts of Hoggoth! ... By the all-seeing eye of Agamotto! ... By the crimson bands of Cyttorak! ... By the mystic moons of Munnopor! ... By the eternal Vishanti! ... By the seven rings of Raggadoor!

At a comic fair a few years ago I saw half a dozen issues of Strange Tales, from the original Ditko era, at a knock-down price. Admittedly they weren’t in great condition, but I snapped them up anyway. The one pictured above (the open comic) is #126 from November 1964, which was something of a turning point in the series. According to Blake Bell in Strange and Stranger: The World of Steve Ditko:

The scope of the series exploded with issue 126. “The Domain of the Dread Dormammu” features Dr Strange transcending the physical barriers of Earth, delving into a dimension ruled by the powerful despot Dormammu, a character Devil-like in appearance and just as ruthless. Here the series makes the turn that catapults Dr Strange into alternate, parallel universes, with Ditko’s craftsmanship and imagination stretching the boundaries of known physical laws and dimensions.”

By the time I started reading Marvel Comics in 1968, Dr Strange had his own title, with the numbering continuing from Strange Tales. The series was cancelled after just over a year, and as far as I can remember I only ever had issue #177 (pictured above), written by Roy Thomas and drawn by Gene Colan. A second Doctor Strange series started in 1974, initially drawn by Frank Brunner and then by Gene Colan. I really liked these at the time, because the art seemed much more “grown up” to my sophisticated 16-year-old mind than the usual comic-book fare of the time. Issue #5 is pictured above (a “cents” rather than “pence” copy, connoisseurs will note).

Fast-forwarding to the 21st century, Dr Strange is still around and scheduled to get the Marvel Cinematic Universe treatment in 2016. These days he’s a member of the Illuminati, along with Iron Man, Professor X, the Fantastic Four’s Reed Richards, Black Bolt and Namor the Sub-Mariner. That’s not to say they’re members of the sinister Illuminati I was talking about last week – this is a secret Marvel super-group that calls itself by the same name.

I bought New Avengers: Illuminati on the basis of the title, but I’m not going to pretend I liked it (although I shouldn’t be too critical of modern Marvel comics, because I’m about as far from the target audience as it’s possible to get). To my mind, any group calling itself the Illuminati has to be one that hides in the shadows and pulls powerful strings. They don’t have to be working towards a “New World Order” – in fact they can be doing just the opposite. You might expect a “heroic” Illuminati to be working behind the scenes to maintain stability and preserve the current world order. I think that’s what Marvel’s version of the Illuminati is supposed to be doing, but it doesn’t come across very clearly in the stories. All the crises they deal with (in the book I read, anyway) could have been handled just as well by the Avengers or the Fantastic Four.

But that’s a technicality. The real reason I disliked Marvel’s Illuminati is that – in my crankily old-fashioned opinion – they repeatedly break the first rule in the superhero team rulebook. That states that at some point in every adventure, each team member should use their special ability to achieve something that couldn’t possibly have been done in any other way. That just doesn’t happen in the Illuminati (unless you count Reed’s special ability as “talking a lot”, Tony Stark’s as “being rich” and Namor’s as “having an Atlantis-sized chip on his shoulder”).

I’m probably taking nonsense, of course, because I don’t know anything about modern comics. But things were different 35 years ago, when I did a school project on the subject at the tender age of 11. Among other things, I produced tracings of various Marvel heroes, one of the best of which was a Ditko pinup of Dr Strange. Some time ago (ten years ago this month, as a matter of fact) I made a scan of the tracing and had a go at enhancing it digitally to make it look less like the work of an 11-year-old. Here is the result, before and after:

Phascinating Phacts

Of all the words in the English language, “fascinating” has one of the oddest derivations. In modern usage the word simply means “very interesting”, with vague overtones of “mesmerizing” or “casting a spell on”. But it originates from the old Latin word fascinus, which referred to a special kind of charm or amulet taking the form of an erect human phallus (sometimes with wings). Phallic charms of this type were extremely popular in the days of ancient Rome, when it was believed they had the power to ward off evil influences. If you type “fascinus” into a Google image search you’ll see the sort of thing I’m talking about.

Phallic symbolism was surprisingly common in ancient religions, as I pointed out in my post on A Victorian Theology of Everything a couple of years ago. The book I referred to in that post was one I’d found in a second-hand bookshop, and at the time I had no idea who the anonymous author was. I’ve since discovered that it was a man named Hargrave Jennings (1817–1890), who seems to have more or less invented the subject of “phallicism”, and then devoted his whole career to writing about it.

Widespread as they are, phallic icons and amulets are usually purely symbolic in nature. But there’s one example—in fiction, at least—where it’s the real thing: the Talisman of Set. This features in one of the best occult novels of the twentieth century – Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out, first published in 1934. The novel was used as the basis for a 1967 Hammer film of the same title, which (within the limitations of the 90 minute format) is reasonably faithful to the book. The screen version omits large chunks of occult background, but the basic plot is preserved, as well as a surprising amount of Wheatley’s dialogue. But the film doesn’t mention the Talisman of Set.

One of the main characters (in both the book and the film) is a young man named Simon, who is being pursued by a Crowleyesque occultist called Mocata. In the film, the reason why Mocata is so desperate to get hold of Simon is never explained – you just have to take it for granted. But the book goes into much more detail: Simon has discovered the secret of the Talisman of Set. This object, which is supposed to have been lost and found countless times throughout history, is nothing less than the mummified phallus of the Egyptian God Osiris! And unlike a Roman fascinus, this is no lucky charm – “whenever it is found it brings calamity upon the world” (it was given its sinister powers by Set, the brother of Osiris – hence its name). In 1914, the Talisman of Set had unleashed the Great War on the world, and now (in the 1930s) Mocata wants to use it to trigger a second global war.

Despite being the procreative organ of one of the most powerful gods in the Egyptian pantheon, the Talisman—when it’s finally tracked down—isn’t much to look at: “a small black cigar-shaped thing, which was slightly curved”. Eventually Mocata is defeated, and (in the novel) the Talisman of Set is duly incinerated... thus averting the threat of a Second World War. In reality, of course, the Second World War wasn’t averted... so perhaps that’s why Hammer decided to omit the Talisman of Set from the movie version. Or then again, maybe they were worried that the sight of Christopher Lee and Charles Gray chasing across Europe in pursuit of a shrivelled black phallus wouldn’t have gone down too well with the viewing public!

Devil-worship

The Devil of mediaeval Christianity was a thoroughly unpleasant character, and it's difficult to understand why anyone would have wanted to worship him. Yet the idea that certain individuals indulged in "Devil-worship" was common during the Middle Ages. There are at least three different (and completely independent) explanations for this:

[1] Paganism. Before Christianity came to Europe, there were several perfectly benign pagan deities who had superficially "Devil-like" characteristics, such as horns or cloven feet, or were associated with goats or serpents. One example is the Celtic God Cernunnos, pictured on the left (this is a modern representation on display in the Museum of Witchcraft in Boscastle, Cornwall). It's possible that worship of such deities survived in secret into the Middle Ages, and when encountered by Christians was misinterpreted as Devil-worship (It's also possible that the iconography of the Christian Devil was deliberately modelled on these pagan deities, in order to deter people from worshipping them).

[2] Gnosticism. This was a variant form of Christianity, which existed for several centuries alongside the mainstream form. Gnostics worshipped Christ, who they believed was the Son of the one true God... but at the same time they believed the God described in the Book of Genesis was an impostor who had created a world that was flawed and inherently evil. In this view, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden was arguably on Christ's side, since he was an enemy of the pseudo-God! At least one mediaeval Gnostic sect, the Ophites, actually worshipped the Serpent... although this wasn't really Devil-worship, because in their interpretation the Serpent was the Good Guy and the Creator was the Bad Guy!

[3] The Occult. The idea that certain individuals had dealings with the Devil (or one of his subordinate demons) was common in medieval folklore, as attested by the legends of Faust or Pan Twardowski (see A Polish Pact with the Devil). Undoubtedly some people really did try to summon up demons by magical means -- although I wouldn't be surprised if these attempts were inspired by the legends, rather than the other way around. Whether this counts as Devil-worship is a moot point, since the individuals concerned are generally portrayed as being Christians who are revolted by the thought of the Devil -- but persuaded to  deal with him by the promise of worldly power. In reality, if such things ever did take place in the Middle Ages, I suspect the participants were just bored, over-educated cynics who had no expectations of anything supernatural occurring... much like the people who enact "Satanic rituals" in our own supposedly more enlightened times!

Black Easter

Rituals aimed at summoning demons from Hell are described in countless works of fiction, but probably none so comprehensive or accurate (with respect to genuine occult writings of the mediaeval period) as James Blish's short novel Black Easter, or Faust Aleph-Null (1968). The novel centres around an experiment designed to release no less than forty-eight of the most senior demons for one night only, and then return them to Hell. As a safeguard, the experiment is scheduled for Easter Sunday, the least auspicious day of the year from a demon's point of view. But in spite of all precautions, the experiment goes disastrously wrong. In an apocalyptic final scene the demon Baphomet triumphantly declares "God is dead."

In common with other science fiction writers of his generation such as Eric Frank Russell and Fredric Brown, James Blish was an avid follower of Charles Fort. His most Fortean novel is Jack of Eagles (1952), about a group of people with "wild talents" -- the book contains several references both to Fort himself and to the Fortean Society.

For the majority of readers, however, Blish will be best known for the Star Trek adaptations he produced in the 1960s and early 70s, and for Spock Must Die (1970) -- the very first original Star Trek novel. Despite the melodramatic title, this is quite a serious book (and Fortean in its own way), with discussions of solipsist philosophy, tachyon physics and the literary style of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake! On the other hand, the novel is probably infuriating to hardened Star Trek fans, since Kirk, Spock, McCoy and the rest all talk exactly like characters in a James Blish novel, and nothing like their counterparts on TV!

Another mildly Fortean novel by James Blish is Midsummer Century (1972), which deals inter alia with mystical experiences and ESP. My copy of the book (left) was signed by Blish at the Science Fiction Easter Convention in Coventry in 1975... sadly only a few months before he died. During the convention, at one of the panel discussions, he made it clear that at the time he wrote Black Easter he meant it to depict the end of the world, and had no intention of writing a sequel. Eventually his publisher persuaded him otherwise (The Day after Judgment, 1971), but his first reaction was that the publisher's request was a joke -- he suggested the opening line of the sequel would have to be "Meanwhile, in another Universe..."

Crystal-gazing

As you might guess from the crystal ball on the cover, crystal-gazing is one of the topics covered in The Complete Book of Fortune: a Comprehensive Survey of the Occult Sciences (undated, but from internal evidence I'd guess it was written in the 1930s). The book also deals with the Tarot, astrology, tea-leaf reading, palmistry, handwriting analysis, phrenology and dream interpretation... but in at least one sense, crystal-gazing is different from any of these. With a crystal ball, the practitioner allegedly sees events in the future, rather than having to interpret "portents" through obscure layers of symbolism.

According to Saint Augustine, crystal-gazing was used as a form of divination by the ancient Persians... but he believed the scenes they saw were false prophecies created by malevolent demons. Much later, during the nineteenth century, crystal-gazing was put on a pseudo-scientific footing by Baron von Reichenbach, who postulated a hitherto unknown force called odyle which linked crystalline substances with human consciousness.

By the time this book was written (I bought it for two pounds at a car boot sale, in case you're wondering) crystal-gazing was a popular attraction on fairgrounds and seaside piers... but the anonymous authors are scathing about such acts ("It seems to be an inflexible rule of the occult that, whenever any manifestation of psychic power is exploited by human beings for their own commercial benefit, that power, if the greater part of it is not taken away from such unworthy custodians, ceases, at least, to display its deeper and more inspired attributes"). The book also warns the reader against the use of magical ceremonies and incantations, which "may be considered not only as unnecessary to the encouragement of lucidity, but even dangerous." That's what I wanted to hear!

One of the most famous proponents of crystal-gazing (who wasn't afraid to use magical ceremonies and incantations, either) was the Elizabethan occultist Dr John Dee (1527 - 1609). Dee's own crystal ball has survived to this day, and is on display in the British Museum (see below).

A Trip to the Witches' Sabbath

The cover picture on the left is from the Summer 1948 issue of Detective Mystery magazine. At first glance, with its dancing witches and leering devil, it appears to be typical of the lowbrow "shudder pulps" of the time. But in fact the cover depicts John Dickson Carr's novel The Crooked Hinge (originally published in book form ten years earlier)... and although this does indeed touch on the subject of witchcraft, it's not in the way you might expect if you're not familiar with Carr's work.

John Dickson Carr (1906–1977) was a prolific author of mystery novels, specializing in the sub-genre known as the "locked room mystery" (not necessarily involving a literal "locked room", but always a seemingly impossible crime). Carr's novels (whether written under his own name or the pseudonym of Carter Dickson) are always full of misdirection and obfuscation, and to this end he frequently used Fortean sub-themes -- for example an Egyptian curse (Lord of the Sorcerers), a vampire (He Who Whispers), a ghost (The Case of the Constant Suicides), a mind-reader (The Reader is Warned), spiritualism (The Plague Court Murders), palmistry (Till Death Do Us Part), the Tarot (Eight of Swords)... and witchcraft (The Crooked Hinge). These apparently supernatural elements are always shown to have non-supernatural explanations -- and they usually turn out to be irrelevant to the eventual solution of the mystery!

The sub-theme of witchcraft is just one of several obfuscating elements that Carr throws into Crooked Hinge. A year before the murder, a young local woman was found dead in her own home, her naked body smeared all over with a strange ointment. The explanation for this, when it is eventually given, is fascinating: "For six hundred years there's been a vast mass of testimony from those who claim to have gone to witches' Sabbaths and seen the presence of Satan... What would make a person believe them to be facts? It's been argued that in a great number of cases the 'witch' never left her own house or even her own room. She thought she had attended the Sabbath in the grove. She thought she had been conveyed by magic to the defiled altar and found a demon lover there. She thought so because the two chief ingredients of the ointment were aconite and belladonna. Belladonna, absorbed through the pores of the skin would rapidly produce excitement, then violent hallucinations and delirium, and finally unconsciousness. Add to this the symptoms produced by aconite: mental confusion, dizziness, impaired movement ... a mind steeped in descriptions of Satanist revels would do the rest."

This isn't just Carr's imagination, by the way -- exactly the same theory was put forward by David Hambling in issue 173 of Fortean Times (August 2003). Hambling added the interesting snippet that witches would sometimes smear the end of a broomstick with the ointment before putting it between their legs... interpret that however you want!

A Polish Pact with the Devil

The impressively phallic-looking rock pictured on the left is known as Maczuga Herkuleza (the Club of Hercules), and is to be found in the Ojcowski National Park near Kraków in Poland. The photograph was taken by Ewa Babarowski, who drew my attention to the following connection between the rock and the Faust-like legend of Pan Twardowski...

Twardowski is supposed to have been a sorcerer who sold his soul to the Devil in sixteenth-century Kraków. The character may be entirely legendary, or he may be based on a real person... possibly even the English occultist Edward Kelley, who received his infamous Enochian Keys (by some magical means, quite possibly involving a pact with the Devil) while visiting Kraków in the 1580s.

According to the Polish legend, Twardowski negotiated a contract that saw him endowed him with formidable powers and knowledge until such time as he should go to Rome, at which time the Devil could have the sorcerer's soul and take it to Hell. Twardowski, of course, had no intention of ever visiting the Holy City -- but in fairly short order he found himself wandering into a local tavern which just happened to be called... Rome! When the Devil arrived to claim his soul, Twardowski attempted a few delaying tactics by giving His Satanic Majesty a series of seemingly impossible tasks... one of which was to balance this huge rock on its end!

Pulp Buddhism

Om Mani Padme Hum, besides being a Tibetan Buddhist mantra, was the battle-cry of that unlikeliest of all pulp heroes, the Green Lama. Created by Kendell Foster Crossen for Double Detective magazine in 1940, the Green Lama was a crime-fighting Buddhist monk. Interesting as this sounds, the Green Lama's Buddhism was simply a gimmick to make the character stand out from other similar pulp heroes such as the Shadow, the Spider and the Phantom Detective, and the stories never showed any real understanding of Buddhist ideas or beliefs. But there is a much better example of Pulp Buddhism...

Seabury Quinn's novelette "Living Buddhess" appeared in the November 1937 issue of Weird Tales. Like most of Quinn's stories in that magazine, it featured his occult detective Jules de Grandin (there are over eighty de Grandin stories, some better than others... this is one of the better ones). Unlike the Green Lama's author, Seabury Quinn gives a convincing Buddhist background to this story -- in particular describing the way that, in certain parts of Asia, core Buddhist beliefs became interwoven with older superstitions and rituals.

The villain of the story is a centuries-old Buddhist priest who, reluctant to be reincarnated every time into the body of a new-born baby, discovers a way to transmigrate his essence into an adult of his choice. As you might guess from the story's title, his latest "victim" is a woman -- a young American socialite named Sylvia Dearborn. With the aid of a knowledgeable Buddhist friend, Jules de Grandin eventually succeeds in defeating the evil priest and restoring Sylvia to her normal state. But before then, while she is still "possessed", Sylvia has the habit of chanting "Emdap Inam Mo"... the Buddhist equivalent of Satanists reciting the Lord's Prayer backwards!

Voodoo recycling

Here's a publishing oddity. Two novels with different titles, different authors and different heroes... and yet the overall plot and most of the events are almost identical. First we have Sexton Blake Library no. 496: Come Dark, Come Evil by Wilfred McNeilly, published in March 1962. Then there is Dark Ways to Death by Peter Saxon (1968), the second book in a series featuring a group called The Guardians. "Peter Saxon" was a house name used by several different authors, McNeilly among them... so this is presumably a case of McNeilly recycling his own material rather than any kind of plagiarism.

The original version is actually quite good, with Sexton Blake and his team pitted against a voodoo cult who carry out their rituals (including human sacrifices) in disused tunnels of the London Underground. There are hints of occult powers at work, but in the end it's all wrapped up with a neat rational explanation for everything. The Snake God worshipped by the cult turns out to be a rich industrialist who has become obsessed with the "left-hand path".

The problem with the later version is that (unlike Sexton Blake) the "Guardians" books are science fiction: the Guardians themselves have paranormal powers, and their job is to battle occult forces. There's nothing wrong with that, of course, as long as the occult forces are the only possible explanation of what goes on, and using paranormal powers is the only possible way to resolve the story. But the existence of the first version proves that neither of these is the case! It was a perfectly good story with a perfectly satisfying ending. To make it fit into the Guardians format, McNeilly has to make the Snake God a real Snake God, while the rich industrialist obsessed with the left-hand path (who is still in the story, for some reason) is just a harmless eccentric!